Funny thing happened at the optometrist today
So I am legally a pensioner, I have a pension card and everything because I have a disability and don't work. This place, which it needs be remarked works with various disabled people, what with its selling prescription glasses n that, has a pensioner's discount. I mention being a pensioner and show them my pension card.
Girl behind the counter looks at it and says "oh no, we mean pensioner as in, like... old people..." And I'm like that's that's not indicated anywhere but fair enough, it is what it is. I'm not fighting this because it's kind of just how it works in Australia, the word is used colloquially to mean "whatever demographic you aren't when you try to claim the discount."
But this girl smiles at me and, now knowing that I'm disabled, does The Puppy Voice and says, "aww well that's okay! Let me just put it in here," pretends to press a few buttons on the computer, and then tells me my discount is applied. Except, like, it's very clearly the same price. I point that out.
She, again now knowing I'm disabled and talking to me like a child, says, "nooo it's a lot lower" and like, insists on this, until a family member who's with me tells her to cut it out.
I was a PhD candidate lol
I feel like a lot of the time when normie progressives encounter ableism, particularly against autistic people, their automatic response is to defend disabled people by cherrypicking those of us who have made massive accomplishments or whatever.
And like, OK, that feels like encountering someone saying that Black people are a low IQ drain on the world and responding like "nuh uh Neil DeGrasse Tyson has a PhD."
Like bro who cares. Your principles should be that it's not OK to treat anybody like shit, withhold their rights or create societal circumstances that oppress them based on any bullshit.
I think that a lot of normie lefties struggle with this though because while Black people do not have low IQs or whatever, people with intellectual disabilities do have intellectual disabilities. Characterizing them as less able is not in fact a harmful stereotype made up to justify oppression, it's just the literal situation, and now you need to understand oppression through a lens of meaningful difference. It's not "that's not true," it's "that is true in this case, what do we do about it?"
The principle of equality of opportunity, which underlies a lot of white anti-racist thought (I know lol), does not work when approaching disability, because you can only meaningfully address disability by looking at equity of opportunity and equality of outcome.
But that's hard. So, a lot of normals kind of prefer to be like, "nuh uh disabilities aren't even disabilities bro. Blind people can just use audiobooks and Braille and them dogs, y'know them dogs? Actually it's harmful and condescending to say that blind people can't see." This is especially pronounced with autism because there is a massive range in what autism is and does, so people aim for people like Neil DeGrasse Tyson or Greta Thunberg or idk their mate Stevie from high school as their case for autism, and they'll say, "of course autistic people can speak and work jobs and learn normally, this is a harmful stereotype."
You need to approach disability subject matter from the framing of, "okay, so these people can't [X], how do we accommodate their needs?"
watching the leftism leaving peoples bodies when you point out the sex offender registry is a grotesque violation of human rights
the only reason the registry exists is because we culturally view sexual crimes as inherently more evil and unforgivable than any other kind of violence. people are more willing to believe that a murder can grow and change than a flasher. if you’re woke enough to believe that ‘innocence’ is a fascist concept and sex is just another thing the body can do, then you should believe the corollary: hurting someone with your genitals is no different from hurting them with your fists
and yet, murderers and other violent offenders do not have their full names, faces, and addresses put on a public database for the rest of their lives. there is no such thing. they are not legally barred from watching movies containing violence, or owning imagery containing violence
in my state, sex offender probation means you can be searched, at any time, without a warrant, and owning a copy of playboy is a violation. it means you’ll be arrested if a family member comes to stay with you and you don’t register their vehicle with the sheriff. the dehumanization is beyond the pale
not to mention how the registry is used against otherwise oppressed groups. homeless and pissing in public cuz theres nowhere else to piss? sex offender registry. i had a gf one time who's mom met me and then immediately went and checked the registry purely cuz im a trans woman.
A lot of disabled people end up on the registry for absolutely asinine reasons, and are then denied access to accommodative housing based on that inclusion.
Again, pissing in public, boom, you now have incredible difficulty ever being signed on with a residential care program or day service.
I've even heard of one-on-one support services denying people because "we can't put our employees in danger."
Some states in the US and in Australia (where I live) have special considerations and so on for people with intellectual disabilities, but it's an absolute crapshoot as to whether they'll decide to exempt you.
So there's this ancient true crime situation where a deaf and mute dude in ye olde England was witch trialled by an evil town because some lady thought he cursed her. Many such cases.
TO BE FAIR this dude spent a while divining the future or whatever for cash, because if you're going to be slurred as a witch you might az well make some money doing it. It's not like deafmutes had many other career opportunities back then and fortune telling beats poor houses.
But what's weird about this case is, the town had also decided the dude was French. They like saw this disabled guy and they were like, this man is clearly getting his insidious third teat sucked on by the devil's minions and also,
importantly,
he is French.
So I was talking to my doctor earlier and he explained that they're experimenting with testosterone treatment in men as a way of managing symptoms of schizophrenia. Schizophrenia is, it is well known, affected by testosterone. So doctors want to harness the raw power of the tough manly stoic makes-you-mentally-ill hormone to make us less mentally ill.
Soon I'll smear TRT jelly all over my balls and become more powerful than you could ever imagine. Able to work --
-- probably at McDonalds because I have a five year gap on my resume and my qualifications are super out of date lol.
Y'know assuming anti-transgender legislation in the US and UK doesn't fuck this up (it will).
So I am now formally diagnosed with the ADHD which is extremely whatever. Unfortunately when you are diagnosed with dummy disorder as a baby you end up collecting fifty labels by the time you're eighteen. I am excited to abuse ritalin though.
Anyway, I also have a close friend with ADHD who's presentation is very disabling and serious. You know, he's fucking up his schedule, going through waves of insomnia, flaking on everything, chronic anhedonia and depression, sometimes going days without eating because it just doesn't occur to him to eat. ADHD shit. We're all sympathetic, it is what it is.
Except
now I can say
"You know, I also have [condition], and I don't [symptom]" for the first time in my life
Girl I understand why assholes do this shit now. It rocks. Best feeling in the world to finally be able to be ableist against someone else, instead of just being on the receiving end. Hell yeah, notice and be demeaned by my ability to, uh, show up on time to events. Nevermind that my strategy for doing so is not sleeping the night before. I'm More Able.
This is the 2025 Asperger's, Not Autistic experience babyyy.
i mean obviously i'm joking and i'm not actually like that but
Dark Tawked would be
Exhaustingly, the online disability world can be incredibly racist. It often feels like a classic "there are no girls on the internet" environment, but regarding POC. Everybody is assumed white and whenever somebody articulates that racially marginalized people have a massively different experience of the medical system, which is just fucking true, people come at them in all kinds of ways but kind.
Sometimes they see it as invalidating their own experiences of isolation and marginalization, which is nuts to me. I'm reading a conversation where somebody points out that Black people are often misdiagnosed with schizophrenia, which again, is simply the case, and like four people jump down their throat like "we're already oppressed, why are you trying to divide us?"
Mate, that there's any misdiagnosis of a serious, legally permanent condition that has specific legal concessions to withhold your rights is serious. Incorporating the fact that it happens along racist lines all the time is vital to understanding this issue that affects you too, dumbass. And even if it didn't affect you, you should care about abuse like that, even if you have nothing in common with the people being abused. But in this case, you do have something in common and that whiteness will not protect you when the moment comes. With the MAHA movement, Donnie's executive order reopening the institutions, and the relentless ongoing stigmatization of schizophrenia as the root cause of mass violence -- it's coming.
imo this is most visible in the self-diagnosis discourse. One of the many reasons that a lot of Black, brown and Indigenous people don't pursue formal diagnosis is that the medical system is racist. It's not a case of these people being so able-bodied that they can't pass autism muster, it's that they're at risk of having something like schizophrenia or a "learning disorder" slapped on 'em when what they really need is access to support services without the intrusion into their personal lives that SCZ and ID comes with. But when these people are told to fuck off by the online disabled world, or weird rants bitching about them are circulated around supposed disabled spaces, always with the presumption that the only people relying on self-diagnosis are rich white Heathers and crystal moms who are just doing it for attention. Infuriating.
idk annoying rant sorry i'm just frustrated at the internet today
Anyway I really do dislike the trope of, "this person was sooo disabled and suffering sooo much that we just had to euthanize them."
Bitch I'm serious try cocaine first. Never kill yourself or mercykill others until you've had them absolutely fuckass off their tits. Take them to Hooters. Eat their ass all the way out. Experiment.
There are so many things you should probably attempt before you resort to murdering someone, but the text that plays on this compelled euthanasia / mercykilling trope is always committed to preserving this kind of innocence and grace about the disabled character. See, if we saw the disabled character like licking lines off of a stripper's crack before the big pillow smother scene, it'd make the pillow smother scene less sad to the audience objectifying the disabled character as a tragic accessory to the protagonist's development.
From my perspective as one of the Scary Disabled whomst people would prefer be in an institution, uh I'd prefer that people just give me a lot of DMT and a blowjob to see if that makes my life seem less pathetic and more worth living, before they Aktion T4 me, y'know?
fondly remembering the time Apple made an assistive speech device, a thing that talks for you based on what you type ala a Stephen Hawking situation, that requires the user to
read a script aloud
to set it up
the same people who design shit like that are trying to convince you that chatgpt is going to be massively beneficial for the disabled lol
I find it frustrating whenever I encounter a homophobe or transphobe in a disability rights space. For me, this happens semi-often. I think because I'm white, cis and shave my head, people assume I'm a Fellow Traveller, but people really do just say weird bigot shit to me assuming I'll laugh along and agree, particularly about transgender women but I've heard it about all queer people before.
Usually this takes the form of straight, cis autistic blokes trying to explain to me how being transgender "doesn't make sense." They've convinced themselves that autism makes them hyper-rational and that therefore anything that they don't understand is automatically irrational. They don't understand how someone with a schlong can be a woman, or how "surgery can turn you into a woman," so they decree it's just some rationally inconsistent shit those silly NTs are doing.
This is obviously annoying for a lot of reasons, but chief right now for me is the absolute lack of understanding that lot of what became conversion therapy, especially as affects transgender kids, started as anti-autism applied behavioural analysis.
Our enemy here is Ole Ivar Lovaas.
Lovaas was a Norwegian "former" fascist who grew up in Norway's National Socialist Youth League, with family deeply committed to an organization called Nasjonal Samling / "National Gathering," the fascist party of Norway between 1942-1945.
Understand that Lovass was only eighteen in 1945. Judging him as an active fascist in the same way we'd judge someone who was 30 in 1945 is, imo, the incorrect schmove, but that he was raised immersed in fascism also seems to be deeply relevant to his character. I'm not going to discuss how he spent most of his life lying about all of this because he knew that, but understand that according to Ole Lovass, he was just a wee little farmboy who never had any Nazi influences in his life.
Meanwhile, his fascist youth defined so much of his work. He was obsessed with the idea that societal-level conditioning can make anybody into anything. He believed deeply in the power of operant condition as an explanation for all kinds of shit. After all, how else did society turn fascist? Operant conditioning by the state.
This led him to conclude that you can use operant conditioning to make an autistic kid normal. He built from the work of Charles Ferster, who came up with errorless learning, the evil basis for applied behavioural analysis that misuses operant conditioning principles to effectively harm autistic kids for showing symptoms. In effect he was doing shit like slapping or electrocuting autistic kids for failing to follow directions or for showing visible symptoms of autism for up to forty hours of immersive therapy per week. This was called Early Intensive Behavioural Intervention, EIBI, and it's a form of ABA that current ABA practitioners pretend to be embarrassed by (though they continue to use milder forms of the same principles).
The effectivenes of treatments like this rely on mistaking or misrepresenting trauma responses for a reduction of, uh, autism, by conflating outward expression with inward experience. If the kid is now making eye contact, that means he's less autistic. He won't show anxiety about this either once we're done abusing him, because that's autism behaviour and we're already here to beat that shit out of him.
But any autistic person on the internet knows that.
As a brief aside, can you fucking believe this actually needs to be fought against? Like that this isn't some one plus two equals buckled shoe obvious shit? Disability rights is exhausting because you are pushing a boulder up a hill that has no business being as steep as it evidently is, while everybody tells you that no one would expect you to push a boulder up a hill, you're disabled, clearly someone would intervene and push that boulder for you.
Anyway.
I find -phobes who are active in anti-ABA disability spaces surprising not because of a moral or even rational inconsistency, but because ABA become the basis of queer conversion therapies. In fact, my dude, it was the same fucking clown what did it. It's not, "oh if I believe that they shouldn't apply this to me, I should not be willing to see it applied to them," it's "Count Dracula was right to hurt Jonathan Harker but going after Mina? That's not on mate."
This dickhead and his cunt mate George Rekers worked on the UCLA Feminine Boy Project, which wanted to use the exact same methods to convert people experiencing "adult transsexualism or similar adult sex-role deviation" into cishetero people. This is where injecting people with shit that'd make them vomit or electrocuting their balls while showing them queer pornography came from. Exact same core concept as ABA, but now applied to expressions of queerness instead of expressions of autism, and in method a little more violent and harmful because it was now working with adults who they could excuse hurting a lot more than cute lil disabled kids.
It's "effectiveness" is the same misunderstanding of trauma responses. It doesn't make you straight, it just traumatizes you enough that fucking men becomes a challenge. You still see this research cited by existing conversion therapies, which still continue to operate despite every useless liberal government making childhood conversion camps illegal, because heaven forbid the "we believe in science" people actually invest in scientific communication.
Knowing this, it should be absolutely obvious that queer liberation and disabled liberation are sibling causes. We cannot achieve one without the other, because fascists will always define queerness as a disability and queer people, particularly queer men, as incomplete men and thus sexually deviant. In fact, I think it is the invalidation of disabled masculinity and sexuality that drives a lot of these blokes to punch down on transgender people, particularly transgender women, who they perceive as having failed more at being men than themselves, men marginalized for being failed men, as a way of reaffirming their own rejected masculinity.
Regardless of the motives, I find it infuriating that I keep running into dickheads that don't grasp this connection, when we're dealing with the same villain and his wicked ways.
*direct punishment and exposure to harmful stimulus like blaring uncomfortable music to disincentivize these behaviours; rewarding or removing uncomfortable stimulus to incentivize good behaviours.
*i don't believe that any men are "failed men," i don't believe in that concept on a moral level. "failed men" is an academic term, and what i mean by "failed men" is men who do not fulfil the expectations of cisheterosexual patriarchal masculinity. men are strong; well this man has a spinal condition that makes him physically weak, therefore he is not a man in the same way or to the same extent. this man is femmy and listphs, therefore he is a fag, therefore he is not a man in the same way or to the same extent. finally, i am not saying transgender women are men, failed or otherwise, i am saying this is what they are perceived to be by these transphobes.
So I'm reading a conversation between a couple other "disabled representation in media" people, and
OK, I don't think showing disabled people being gross is bad representation. I don't think it's going to make people think we're automatically gross. I do think a lot of bad portrayals present that as an assumption, but it's something that can be deconstructed.
Bodies are kinda gross, but sometimes disabilites prevent you from dealing with said gross things without accommodation. That's not the disabled person's fault, but the fault of a systemic lack of accommodation that most people aren't even aware of, thus they choose instead to blame the disabled person. Confronting that means acknowledging that something gross is going on and encouraging people to see the ways it could be resolved, ie. more accessible public bathrooms or whatever.
You know, if all the mobility impaired clients at a residential service are gettin stinky, maybe it's time to investigate whether they are actually able to use the bathrooms, whether there's handrails, chairs under showers, non-slip mats, and whether they've been trained in how to transition in and out of the bathroom. Grossness is a consequence of environmental more-so than personal factors. Every autistic bloke I know who's had bad teeth and halitosis just needed a different method of maintaining their oral hygiene, for instance.
I used to have a client with an intellectual disability who, every time she had her period, would peel her pad off in the bathroom and try to hand it to me. Kinda confronting the first time it happened! That's just how disability can be sometimes though man, sometimes disabled people are going to do "gross" things, but it's best to just empathize and understand what is actually happening.
In this case, she had been taught to always show carers whenever she's bleeding and that bleeding = "you're hurt." She'd never had her period explained to her, because she was fresh outta SPED and from a conservative family. So, over a couple months ('cause it had to be happening for the lessons to actually click), we learned about the difference between "bleeding because you're hurt" and "bleeding because your body is cleaning itself," so as to actually address the panic and distress she was going through every month.
This is actually a pretty normal experience to have when you work with girls and young women with intellectual disabilities. I mean seriously, every year I was working, I'd have at least one client who'd need a couple lessons on what their body's doing, so it could become normal and so we could move on to learning necessary hygiene practices, ie. how to clean up the area and apply another pad.
I do think that there's a wider conversation to have about overcoming the societal perception that something like a period or an erection or whatever is "gross." However, within the context of just dealing with the here and now, accepting that this is a real thing that does happen in these environments seems better than insisting a movie or TV show including moments like this is going to make us look gross and therefore normalize people hating us.
Rather, it seems like it'll just lead to more education and public understanding that grossness is not the default of disability, but that often it is an indicator that something we can fix is going on.
I do think drawing an intellectually disabled bloke with really exaggerated features and like stinky flies buzzing around his head is a different thing though. Like, not much of educational value can be extracted from obvious ableist caricatures.
I have to make an overly-long annoying post about schizophrenia in comic books. I'm sorry.
I'm reading Geoff Johns' Justice Society and he does a thing with a schizophrenic villain going "off their meds" and blah blah blah.
So, when it comes to schizophrenic villains, I'm most often annoyed by the technical elements of how they're written, like the accuracy of symptoms and so on. Frankly, the fact that every schizophrenic villain is a supercrip who isn't even fucking disabled really annoys me.
I'm schizophrenic and all I do, all I really can do because of the disorder, is read comic books and build Zoids. I need a "carer" to leave the house, I can't use public transport, I sure as shit cannot hold a job any more, yadda yadda.
So, wym all these hyper-functional schizophrenics in the comic books are putting together multi-layered schemes? Oh, and then they can focus for the weeks necessary to actually implement said schemes? How are they awake for that much time? How are they able to remember to do shit like bathe and eat when their environment is constantly changing? How are they able to make it through these ever-changing environments? How are they able to remain committed to a single task for days at a time?
How come not one of them has diorganized speech? Or, for that matter, a flat or blunted affect? Here, check this video out and pay attention to how this dude's expression and tone are really static. It's not just that he's unable to coherently articulate his thought in a straightforward way, it's the whole shebang.
Schizophrenic characters in comics are only schizophrenic when it's time to write dramatic hallucination sequences, or as a way for the writer to dodge the need to give their villain a proper motivation.
And another thing, schizophrenic villains are always framed as a medicine issue. It's to the point where there's an arc where the Joker is temporarily "cured" because Batman shoves a fistful of pills down his throat. Or, schizophrenics just "go off their meds" and that's the beginning of their arc. This is a weird false wokeness thing, where the writer has the off-ramp of saying, "not all schizophrenics! the ones who take their pills and don't act too disabeld are fine, they're victims of these other freaks making them look dangerous if you really think about it!" So, in other words: "I'm not saying ALL Irish people are drunken louts who want nothing more than to blow up whatever they don't like, but y'know, SOME of them do like dynamite."
Mate, I've been stable and mostly lucid, with only kinda unobtrusive hallucinations and very occasional bad nights, for five years. I have been off meds for a year and a half without relapse. The difference: I now have reasonably secure housing and I'm not working, so I'm not forcing myself out into the world for survival.
Obviously every schizophrenic is different, and what's worked for me has not worked for other people I know. Meanwhile, I have a schizophrenic firned who is actually straight up stable, you would not even know he's schizophrenic unless you knew what to watch for and you'd more likely assume he's just autistic or something, and all he needs is some Abilify.
In real life, it varies. In fiction, especially American fiction, it is always "he went off his meds because they made him sleepy and/or weepy."
It is always this:
Hell yeah, the Flash is such a cool, nice dude. Look at him condescend to this man and convince him to walk right into the psych ward instead of beating his ass. What a hero.
Girl I bet if you asked this Flash if he'd be OK with having a schizophrenic neighbour, he'd hesitate and say, "well... are they taking their meds? it's just, I have kids in my neighbourhood, so..."
It would make more sense for, say, Trickster here to have a relapse because his fuckass boss started harassing him and messing with his schedule. It would make more sense for him to have a relapse because he got fired and couldn't make rent.
Hey, here's an angle worth considering: schizophrenics deal with more violence in ways most people do not even realize. Back when I was sick-sick, I had someone call the cops on me for the crime of talking to myself and pacing at a bus stop. The cops immediately escalated this and I ended up slammed into the concrete and held down with a pig on my back for like 15 minutes. This led to such severe anxiety, which of course fed into my SCZ situation, that I was in the psych ward for a few weeks. That kind of shit could easily be happening to your standard schizophrenic supervillain.
I mean, that's sort of what happens in that annoying Joker movie, and everybody hated that. Y'know, even though tbh bro that's kind of just how being disabled in public can be, and uh it was actually innovative to have a mentally ill villain escalate due to something other than going off their meds. The reason people didn't fuck with it is that oh he did some violence on those goobers and fair enough, he's not exactly a "positive portrayal" (though I don't think a movie about the Joker is aiming to be a postivie portrayal lol), but the bar is genuinely so low that just showing his mental health crisis as a consequence of harassment and abuse is novel when it frankly should be far more of a norm.
Finally, do not mention Chris Claremont's David Haller to me.
I will become so mad that I shit my pants.
David from the FX series is my beloved, one of the best explorations of the disorder in the genre. David from the comics is every single shit trope about schizophrenia in one boy for like 30 years of books.
Huh! Real has the first portrayal of a rotationplasty I've actually seen in fiction. idk how common one kind of below-the-knee amputation is over others, but most people I've personally known have had rotationplasty procedures (which to be clear is like three dudes) and it's always been strange to me that I've never seen it in media.
For people who don't know, rotationplasty basically attaches the foot back to the body but reversed, to serve as a knee joint. It enables someone to use more flexible forms of prosthesis, like below:
You can see where the person's foot sits in the prosthetic and how bending it functions as a knee, right?
Oh heads up, if you're going to google to see more prosthesis designs like this, be aware that you're likely to see a lot of recovery / recent post-op photos, and they can be pretty intense because swelling hasn't receded, stitches are visible, yadda yadda.
One thing I do like though is that Togawa opts for full-time chair use. Not because I think one kind of mobility aide is better or worse, but because I like attention to the detail that he chooses his own mobility aides. The doctors have funnelled him toward one kind of mobility aide (not because of the procedure, but because of an implied lack of ongoing care and rehabilitation), and he's not schmovin comfy with it
Then he meets a Radical Dude who does chair bunnyhops
and by making a chair seem normal, cool, fast and comfortable, Tora allows Togawa to realize, oh shit, that's it, that's my schmovement.
It's a neat lil moment imo.